‘Pseudoscience Fiction’ by Kristian North | New Album, ‘Pseudoscience Fiction’
Exclusive video premiere of ‘Pseudoscience Fiction’ by Kristian North, taken from the upcoming album, ‘Pseudoscience Fiction,’ out May 19th, 2023 via Mothland.
‘Pseudoscience Fiction’—the title track and second single from Kristian North’s new album—is also its most direct statement. Against a hard disco backdrop, North sets the scene: “As a swarm of locusts/ Usher in the new disease/ My fifteen minutes of celebrity.” Bootsy Collins-style bass licks wriggle through the soundscape, North’s baritone goes robotic, fat synths pulse, and sirens blare during breakdowns, all to alarming effect.
Lyrically, this is ‘Pseudoscience Fiction’ at its most bleak and unwelcoming, but North giftwraps it in the album’s most inviting and immediate sonic textures. Absent here is the multiplicity of voices and the gaggle of guest musicians that populate the album’s other tracks. The song is through-composed, chorusless, filled with restless movement through indistinct and unsettling atmospheres—a smoky mirror, a red sun smudged, a fallen mist. As verses unfurl, North’s neatly doubled vocal starts to find separation, almost coming unglued, threatening to, but never quite, falling apart.
“At some point, I thought it would be the first or last song on the album with this kind of opening or closing credits thing, but it never fit. I noticed it worked by opening the album’s B-side, bolstering the album’s non-linear storytelling, hopping around from past to present to future and back.”
“As the title track, this song also serves as a kind of theme song for the record. I was trying for a kitschy disco song, like something that would be on the Warriors soundtrack or something like that” – Kristian North
With ‘Pseudoscience Fiction,’ Kristian North arrives suddenly at a stark pinnacle of sonic maximalism, matched by lyrical worldbuilding that’s phantasmagoric and freaky. In the course of the eight tracks that comprise the Montreal singer-songwriter’s third solo album, North’s deep croon guides listeners through Ballardian manmade nightmares that are equal parts startling and familiar, intimate and colossal. Like the best speculative fiction, North’s vision of the future is deeply rooted in the past.
The tracks on ‘Pseudoscience Fiction’ engage deeply with the aesthetics of ‘70s soul, funk, and disco, but also make dizzying dips into the wildly disparate realms of rock opera, show tunes, and Hawaiian-tinged country, culminating in an assemblage that defies categorization.
“‘Pseudoscience Fiction’ came from a simple concept; the last few years I keep hearing people say “this is just like science fiction!”. That’s where the album title came from, and that’s the theme—a science fiction story that could happen today. Science fiction has always been this way; a fictional future world used to examine the past or present.” – Kristan North
Headline photo: Georgia Graham
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